Phonological awareness evaluation in pre-school children and first year elementary school students, who attend socially vulnerable schools in Concepcion, Chile

This article presents the results of a diagnostic evaluation of phonological awareness in pre-school children and first year elementary school students, who attend socially vulnerable schools. This study is part of a major research with the objective of designing and validating a program to develop phonological awareness as metalinguistic skill underlying the learning of reading. A sample of 85 children, 43 pre-school and 42 year-1 elementary school students participated in the study. The phonological awareness was assessed using the Linguistic Segmentation Test (PSL) by Orellana y Ramaciotti (2007), standardized for Chilean people. Relations between age, sex, verbal working memory and auditory discrimination were established. In both groups, the results showed scores under the average regarding age in phonological awareness and verbal memory. At the same time, the intra-group analysis of phonological awareness showed differences related to tasks complexity. There was positive correlation among verbal memory and syllabic segmentation in pre-school children and among verbal memory, hearing discrimination and the linguistics segmentation tasks data, in First Year Elementary school students.